Joe Dallesandro: Sex Symbol Between Downfall and Grandeur

At first, the man is but a fragment, a sidelong profile tied to a pillow. Joe Dallesandro’s figure has his eyes still shut, but already music plays in the background, intruding on his sleep. Then a sudden break, a cut, and the close-up of the face morphs into an adult body. From the portrait, a whole person has become visible, and the person is not granted any rest. “Lazy bum” and “rotten pig,” “the work calls,” are the sounds this naked man hears from his partner as she rouses him with a symbolic whip’s lash in the morning. So begins a new day, in which the body that is naked from head to toe is transformed into merchandise.

Dance of the Outcasts
“Flesh,” “Trash,” and “Heat” constitute a rondo of marginalized figures, who at moments gain a sense of their disordered coexistence. They invert American values and ideals, whether it is the uptight nuclear family, the economics of the individual, or the very notion of art itself. The trace of a conventional plot, a dramaturgical arc, or a traditional character development is barely detectable, while the characters drift restlessly from encounter to encounter, and their frayed biographies drift through episodic observations of everyday life.
In 1968, the first part emerged in the same year that feminist Valerie Solanas attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol, who afterward sustained dangerous injuries in the hospital—a turning point not only in the artist’s life but also a somber moment for the once-utopian Warhol Factory in New York, that mythic space of uninhibited meetings and creative energy. A few months after the attack, the then–independent Morrissey, who would die in 2024, directed a portrait of a sex worker’s daily life that, cinematically, also exists in a state of dissolution.

Documentary Realism

“Flesh” is a jaggedly assembled, fragmentary film that comes most alive precisely where it excludes its audience. Time and again, rough cuts and flickering 16mm flash frames disrupt the continuity of scenes. Bits of dialogue and actions break off abruptly, leaving blanks as if no audience is even needed. It’s as if pure, unfiltered life is happening, with the camera briefly turned on here or there, then turned off again. Life seems too fast and volatile to be captured in its entirety at every moment.
“Flesh” achieves a documentary realism in which the act of showing and the thing shown begin to emancipate and become independent of one another. The impression of immediacy and unvarnished truth is pursued not only through improvisational elements in the dialogue but also through the very process of filmmaking itself, which exposes this rough, apparently error-prone technique. An avant-garde cinema that invites the audience to witness its own emergence.

A Man Turns into a Fetish
In these erratic, rough, shaky analog shots, a man becomes a sorrowful hero and a fetish. Time and again Joe Dallesandro, the coolest guy on the block, is naked when he isn’t standing on a street corner waiting for new clients to earn money—money that a wife’s friend needs for her abortion. Over the course of this episodic film, he encounters colleagues, artists, transgender people, war veterans. Sexuality unfurls across uncertain to fluid gender boundaries.
The various forms and depictions of sexuality and eroticism in this work are especially intriguing because, while they rely on plenty of bare skin and close-ups of tongues, they often skip the actual sexual act itself, when it happens at all. They’re more interested in what precedes and follows the act—the approach and the farewell, and the pitfalls of communication. Between them: details, glimpses. Hands that caress a buttock. A breast examined in a close-up. The encounter between Joe Dallesandro, a.k.a. Joe—the name he bears in the film—and a man who displays his war scars from Korea becomes an erotic head cinema. Pornographic literature inflames the mood.

Yet, at the end, the sexual is kept cool, rarely celebratory or liberating, despite the situational humor and unvarnished frankness with which the marginalized and taboo subjects are given a stage. “Flesh” presents the state of a fatigue that culminates again in sleep, and a man confronted with his own thing-ness. By the grotesque sequence in which an artist pays him to pose as a nude model and as a specimen of flesh, muscle, and bone—first with monologues about art and culture and then with the tedious staging and posing that push him to the edge of patience—the piece tests boundaries. Other men pursue him, others try to seduce him, and repeatedly boundaries are felt—an idea that will intensify in the second part of the trilogy.

“Trash”: Joe, the Addict
In “Trash” (1970) everything becomes even more bleak, disillusioned, and tormented. Drugs dull the sense of possibility, sexual frustration, money worries, and general discontent. The next erotic advance is replaced by the next substance. Flirting, seduction—these constantly collide with Joe, the addict. Sex becomes a tedious duty, a form of invasion, or a challenge to feel anything at all—these attempts fail. They culminate in anger, blunt rejection, indifference, and a troublingly sexist attitude. “Trash” is the portrait of a man’s impotence, more an empty shell than a living soul ensnared between exhaustion and arousal as life rips at him.

The film title “Trash” is meant, of course, as a provocation. It confronts the audience with a judgment of taste, signaling an interest in those whom a majority society often looks down upon, exposing the repressed and the unseen—those drives, hopeless lives, and despised realities, including those where the subject (consciously) loses control, where even the body takes on something unsightly. Morrissey also regards “Trash” as an artistic label to be scrutinized, just as in many films where the Warhol brand is attached as a mark of quality, even if Warhol himself is pulling the strings in the background. Morrissey’s trilogy stands as a radical counterpoint to the glossy studio productions of a bygone era of the film industry, and to the refined form- and genre-games of the so-called New Hollywood that defined an era. The trilogy is a candid echo of what resists embellishment and aestheticization—a counterculture in cinematic form, ranging freely among genres and classifications. It unfolds in moments of planning and improvisation, of fiction and documentary tones, of performers and roles, of tragedy and absurd humor, of authenticity and its exaggeration and shaping, where uncertain alliances arise.